Frost Station Alpha 1-6: The Complete Series Read Free

surge of hope, Tamryn silently willed him to shoot the hairy savage in the back. Ram fired, and she was already pumping her fist when the intruder blurred into motion. He dodged so quickly, disappearing from the video pickup, that Tamryn didn’t know if he had ducked or dived to the side. Ram’s crimson laser fire screeched toward the feed, slamming into a wall below the camera, and the display jostled momentarily. Even with the shaking, she didn’t have any trouble seeing an orange laser blast slam into Ram’s eye. He shuddered and collapsed, smoke wafting from his ruined face.
    A second later, the muzzle of a rifle filled the display. Orange flashed, and the feed turned black. A “lost signal” message replaced the view of the room, the same as the one from the station’s exterior.
    Tamryn’s fingers felt cold and numb as she swiped them through the displays, trying to find more of the intruders in the corridors of the station. She had to collect intelligence to send off, even though it would take nearly a day for the information to be relayed back to the midway Fleet station, and it would be another three or four days before she could expect reinforcements.
    She glimpsed two more brawny figures with tattoos and patched clothing jogging through a corridor before they disappeared from the feed. A few seconds later, one of the other internal cameras was shot out—that time, she didn’t see the culprit.
    Tamryn recorded a report to go along with the images, her fingers flying over the holo keyboard faster than she could have spoken the words. While she worked, she grew aware of heavy breathing behind her, just audible over the alarm still wailing in the corridor beyond the door. Sergeant Wu had returned to pacing, but his face was livid, and he clenched his rifle like he might smash it against the wall at any moment. As much as seeing all of the carnage had disturbed Tamryn, Wu had been here a lot longer than she had, grown close to the men now dead on the floor in engineering. It had to be tearing him up that he couldn’t do anything about it.
    “We will do something about it,” she said, her words as much for herself as for him.
    “What?”
    What, indeed. Tamryn eyed the environmental controls. If they knew all of their people were dead, they could remove the oxygen from select sections of the station. The idea of doing that when there might be survivors made her sick to her stomach, but she and every soldier here had sworn an oath to protect GalCon citizens, and she shuddered to think what would happen once those thugs found the scientists.
    “If you’re thinking of gassing them or cutting off the air, you’d better do it now,” Wu said. “They would have taken engineering first for a reason. They’ll have access to all of the equipment and main computers down there and can override anything we do. Communications is the only equipment that’s headquartered up here.” He jerked his head toward the ceiling, as if to indicate the various dishes and antennae sending and receiving data from the top of the station.
    “I’ll try.”
    Tamryn hit the send button for her message, then switched to the environmental controls console. Before she could do more than wave the display to life, all of the lights on the panel winked out. The display followed, leaving empty air behind.
    “Damn it.” She jabbed at the controls, even though she already knew what had happened. Exactly what Wu had said. They had overridden her controls.
    He sighed. “You have any weapons besides your knives? Because they’re going to come up here eventually. They’ll want to blow up that console.” He pointed at the communications equipment, the only equipment still powered up in the room. “Keep us from sending messages. You have sent messages, right?”
    She was about to say yes, but frowned because her report was still sitting in the outbox. “I tried .” She jabbed a couple of buttons and growled. “It’s the storm. I don’t